Last week saw the second Progressive F# Tutorials in New York held at the Dumbo loft, a great venue in Brooklyn literally under the Brooklyn Bridge. The tutorials ran over 2 days with 2 keynotes: F# in an Open Source World – Don Syme, Microsoft Reseach F# Beyond Windows – Miguel De Icaza, Xamarin & Mono F# is an open source language with a strong open source community and in his keynote Don talked about how companies and individuals are leveraging F#. Miguel’s keynote focused on F# in Mon[...]

Thanks to Skills Matter last week saw the first GameCraft game jam event in North America.   The first ever GameCraft was held in Dublin back in February 2012. Since then there have been GameCraft events all over Ireland, with an event in Derry sponsored by Nintendo the week before and a month before that an event at Skills Matter’s HQ in London. This time I took a backseat from game development to help out during the day and take part in the judging of the finished games. The theme for the event was “l[...]

I’m a bit of a Pacman fan so when I came across the Pacman Kata in the Kata Catalogue I was hooked: Pacman finds himself in a grid filled with monsters. Will he be able to eat all the dots on the board before the monsters eat him? Back in early 2012 we ran a Pacman Kata at the F#unctional Londoners meetup where you start with a maze and sprites and your task is to write a simple AI. After the event I extended the sample to run on Windows 8, Windows Phone as well as Silverlight and WPF, and somehow go[...]

The machine learning theme continues to be popular at the F#unctional Londoners meetup group. Last night Matt Moloney gave a great hands on session on k-means clustering. Matt has worked on large machine learning systems at e-Bay. More recently he has been working on the Tsunami IDE, an extensible REPL environment for the desktop and cloud. Tsunami provides a lightweight environment focused on interactive development, very suited to machine learning. And with F# 3 Type Providers you get typed access to a[...]

From the window at the office I’ve seen a series of futuristic buildings erected, first the Gherkin, then the Shard and now the Walkie Talkie:   The last one being recently been re-dubbed the Walkie Scorchie as it produces a supercharged solar ‘death ray’ that has burned holes in carpets, melted furniture and even the interior of a Jaguar parked nearby. It feels almost reminiscent of the dystopian future portrayed in the cult film Idiocracy: Though our current society is probably closer to the surve[...]